Clock Without Hands.

Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company,, 1961. Dreadful Creatures! First edition, first printing, presentation copy of the author's final novel, inscribed by her: "For Rebecca, Love, Carson". It is quite probable that the recipient is the writer and academic Rebecca Pitts (1905-1983), who was part of an intimate group of residents at the Yaddo writers' retreat in upstate New York, along with the author, during the summer of 1943. Pitts and McCullers were photographed together at Yaddo that summer, and their "untamed personal behaviour" at the retreat notably scandalized the novelist Katherine Anne Porter, who described the pair as "Dreadful Creatures" (Wald, p. 124; Titus, p. 167). McCullers and Pitts had already worked together before Yaddo while Pitts was an editor at Decision Magazine in New York City between 1941 and 1942, and the author had called upon Pitts during a moment of emotional distress in 1941, asking for help in the weeks following difficult divorce proceedings from her adulterous husband (Carr, p. 184). Octavo. Original red cloth, titles to spine in gilt, and to front cover in gilt on black ground, top edge yellow, dark yellow endpapers. With dust jacket with circular glassine window. A very good copy, extremities rubbed, top edge faded, minor tape discolouration to free endpapers, in unclipped jacket, tape residue to verso, spine ends slightly rubbed, small closed tears to front panel top edge and front flap fold, a sharp, very good copy indeed. "Riding High: Yaddo and the Lecture Circuit - 1943-1944", Ars Femina, available online; Virginia Spencer Carr, The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers, 2003; Mary Titus, The Ambivalent Art of Katherine Anne Porter, 2005; Alan M. Wald, The Literary Left in the Era of the Cold War, 2012.